Co-Located Many-Player Gaming on Large High-Resolution Displays

Two primary types of multiplayer gaming have emerged over the years. The first type involves co-located players on a shared display, and typically caps at four players. The second type of gaming provides a single display for each player. This type scales well beyond four players, but places no requirement on co-location. This paper will attempt to combine the best of both worlds via high-resolution, highly-multiplayer gaming. Over the past few years, there has been a rise in the number of extremely high-resolution, tiled displays. These displays provide an enormous amount of screen space to work with. This space was used to allow twelve co-located players to play a game together. This study accomplishes three things: we designed and built PyBomber, a high-resolution and highly multiplayer game for up to twelve players; secondly, user trials were conducted to see whether this type of gaming is enjoyable as well as to learn what sorts of social interactions take place amongst so many players; lastly, the lessons learned were generalized into design criteria for future high-resolution games. Results show that with more people, much more of the time during a game was filled with vocal interactions between players. There were also more physical movements in the larger games. Over the course of this study, we learned that good high-resolution games will: decide between a singular gameplay area and split views, use the physical space in front of the display, provide feedback that is localized to each player, and utilize input devices appropriately.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Machaj, David Andrew

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• North, Christopher L.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Cao, Yong
• Bowman, Douglas A.

• high-resolution
• multiplayer
• co-located
• gaming
• large tiled display
• collaborative

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-05142009-141802

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/32764